speeding up hard drive wipe

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

On 2020-09-25 19:47, Noah wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I am using the wipe binary to erase a drive.  My hard dive is a 6TB
> SATA drive sitting in an USB drive box.
> 
> $ sudo wipe -q /dev/sdc
> Okay to WIPE 1 special file ? (Yes/No) yes
> 
> The UI is telling me that it will take over 10 weeks to complete one
> round of WIPE.
> 
> Any clues how to speed this up?
> 
> The following DD command took a few hours.
> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=4k
> 
> Cheers

I've never seen or heard of anyone *actually* recovering data from a 
drive wiped by a simple overwrite such as dd does.  I've heard anecdotes 
about how it's theoretically possible, and if you cared about, say, the 
NSA *really trying* to get your data, maybe I'd be worried.  But in the 
real world?  I'm just not.  If you really care, do another wipe with 
/dev/urandom, and call it good: most of your bits will have been 
randomly overwritten, twice.  I just don't see data coming back from 
that.

$.02,

-Ken